[GCARC] Tech Saturday in May - Intro to Arduino Projects

[Jon Pearce]

After a year of shutdown the Technical Committee hopes to restart the monthly Tech Saturday sessions on May 8 at the Clubhouse. Tech Saturday sessions take place on the first Saturday of each month that follows the monthly Wednesday night meeting. We’re hopeful that the combination of vaccination of members and the ability to open windows for ventilation as well as the filtration units in the clubhouse will make that location safe for in-person events by that time. Obviously we’ll continue to re-evaluate that decision as the event nears.

The initial topic that we’re considering is delving into the Arduino microcontroller, which is used for many ham-related projects such as CW translators, station sequencers and rotator controllers. Different from the Raspberry Pi computers covered last year, the Arduino is designed to sense inputs and create outputs through multiple analog and digital ports on its board along with programmable logic to react to inputs and create outputs. It can, for example, as a station sequencer to test to see if a relay connecting an antenna to a transmitter is energized before allowing the transmitter to transmit. We use them at the clubhouse to sense which band the satellite transmitter is on and automatically set the relays to connect the proper antenna to that band. More projects are described in this<http://www.arrl.org/arduino> ARRL book on Arduino use. Many Arduino projects are built with a breadboard using electronic components so they may be attractive to ham “builders”.

For the Tech Saturday sessions participants would purchase this<https://www.amazon.com/ELEGOO-Project-Tutorial-Controller-Projects/dp/B01D8KOZF4/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=ELEGOO+UNO+Project+Super+Starter+Kit&qid=1615136973&s=books&sr=1-1-catcorr> $37 Arduino starter kit containing the Arduino Uno R3 and many other components that can be used in a multitude of projects. The kits also contain a tutorial and program code for building projects with the components. In the Tech Saturday sessions we would work thru a few of the projects, assembling them with the components included in the kits, downloading the program code (also included) into the Arduinos and running the projects. We could continue these sessions as long as participants were interested, with some participants instead choosing to move more quickly through projects on their own, or starting their own different projects.

Let me know if you’d be interested in participating in sessions like this – email me at wb2mnf at arrl.net<mailto:wb2mnf at arrl.net>. Hopefully we’ll have enough interest to fill a few Tech Saturdays with this event and introduce members to these cool devices.

73 de Jon WB2MNF